A NATION CHALLENGED: ALLIANCES; Savoring Strength in the North, U.S. Worries About Weakness in the South

Even as the United States savors a first victory in Afghanistan in the north of the country, senior American officials say the key to defeating the enemy has shifted to the south.

''We're having some battlefield victories, the Northern Alliance is,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today. ''And now it's time for the southern tribes to get active.''

Apart from promising arms and military support, the United States hopes to encourage resistance by signaling commanders in the south that they can secure a place in the post-Taliban government by siding with the United States.

The Bush administration also hopes that the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif and now other towns in the north will persuade Pashtun tribes in the south that the Taliban's days are numbered, and will encourage them to switch sides.

''There is a great risk if the war is seen as a struggle between the United States and the Pashtun,'' a senior Bush administration official said. ''But so far the southern strategy has not gone well.''

Hamid Karzai, who hails from a prominent Pashtun family, has been carrying out a lonely and sometimes dangerous struggle against the Taliban in the wilderness of southern Afghanistan. Already, Mr. Karzai -- a deputy Afghan foreign minister in the early 1990's who is liked by the Bush administration -- has been whisked out of Afghanistan to safety by an American helicopter and then taken back to his redoubt.

A senior Defense Department official said that the American helicopter arrived as the Taliban were closing in.

If Washington's plans to foment resistance in the south were on track, Quetta, the last major Pakistani city before the border with southern Afghanistan, should be bustling with anti-Taliban commanders ready to do the United States bidding. Instead, the lineup is thin.

Sitting in his family home here, Ahmed Karzai, Hamid's brother, listed others who might join in. But it was not a long list. There is Mullah Naquib, the legendary Mujahedeen who held the Russians at bay in the Arghandab Valley more than a dozen years ago. But Mr. Naquib is -- as far as anyone knows -- in his Afghan village tending his garden, a virtual captive of the Taliban.

Jan Mohammed, who went on a failed peace mission to the Taliban from exile in Pakistan last year, is locked up in solitary confinement in a jail in Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold.

Gul Agha, son of a famed warrior known as the ''Lion of Kandahar'' and a fierce fighter in his own right, roams around Quetta in his four-wheel drive, now a well-heeled merchant as worried about what his Pakistani hosts might do to him as about taking on the Taliban.

These are the kind of men that Bush administration officials say they need to build a resistance in the geographical and tribal heartland of the Taliban.

''Afghanistan is not a country that's particularly friendly to foreigners, and we don't want to become the next bunch of foreigners that have problems after they've achieved some initial success,'' Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said in a recent radio interview. ''So the key to achieving our objectives here is enlisting Afghans north and south.''

The reason for a southern strategy is clear. Washington needs a southern Afghan alliance that will provide intelligence and assistance to American and British Special Forces to hunt down Mullah Muhammad Omar and Osama bin Laden, a senior administration official said.

It needs a proxy force in the south to fight on the ground and thus avoid substantial American deployment there. It needs to encourage defections in the Taliban's ranks by avoiding the impression that Washington is siding with the Northern Alliance against the Pashtuns.

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But as the United States seeks to broaden the southern strategy beyond one man, it has run into problems. Washington lacks its own human intelligence about the inner workings of both the Taliban and anti-Taliban forces in the south, people who operate in some of the world's most impenetrable territory and speak some of the world's more obscure languages.

''There is no southern strategy because the United States has not had its own intelligence assets -- ever -- in southern Afghanistan,'' the administration official said.

That has made Washington heavily dependent on Pakistani intelligence, which has dubious loyalties.

In supporting the Mujahedeen against the Soviets in the 1980's, Washington relied to a large extent on Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. This practice continued in the 1990's, when Pakistan helped create the Taliban movement as a stabilizing force in its turbulent next door neighbor. Since Sept. 11, President Pervez Musharraf has installed new anti-Taliban officers at the top of intelligence services, but it is impossible to remake the entire agency quickly.

''The I.S.I. is a very serious problem,'' the official said. ''We have to rely on I.S.I. intelligence reports but we can't tell whether they are accurate and we can't tell what they are doing at the top.''

Even so, the administration official said some new I.S.I. officers had been dispatched inside Afghanistan, and there were some glimmers of what he called ''the right attitude.''

Another reason for Washington's troubles in the south may lie with the American bombing. Abdul Haq, who entered Afghanistan without American support and was captured and executed by the Taliban, complained before his ill-fated mission that the airstrikes had fostered anti-American sentiment in the south.

The key to a southern strategy is lubricating the complex mosaic of Afghanistan's tribal relationships. The Taliban have stressed their extremist religious doctrines over tribal loyalties. A popular poster in Taliban offices reads: ''Favoring tribe is non-Muslim.''

But even after six years of Taliban rule, tribal loyalties prevail, Mr. Karzai said. ''The fundamentalists keep saying they are against tribes, but they know the tribes can rise against them,'' he said.

For example, he said, the Taliban have been afraid to execute Jan Mohammed, now languishing in jail, because they fear the wrath of the Populzai tribe, a major group among Pashtuns of which Mr. Mohammed, like Mr. Karzai, is a leader.

Mr. Mohammed is on sour terms with the Taliban because the main theme of his mission to them last year was a proposal to rid Afghanistan of Al Qaeda, according to a tribal colleague of Mr. Mohammed.

Ahmed Karzai said his brother's strategy was to bring together tribal leaders in four main southern provinces -- Oruzgan, Kandahar, Helmand and Zabol -- which are dominated by the Populzai and three other major Pashtun subgroups.

''If people in Kandahar hear those four tribes are united, the Taliban will be running,'' Ahmed Karzai said. Such a grouping would be threatening to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, who lacks tribal authority and comes from a very small Pashtun group, the Hotak.

In the meantime, the Pentagon and the C.I.A. will keep a close watch on Mr. Karzai. Because of his tribal authority and his ability to project power, American officials see him as more credible than Mr. Haq. They also approve of his consistent message.

But Hamid Karzai has a tricky balancing act. As beloved as he and his family might be in southern provinces, he has to prove to his people that he is a durable alternative to the Taliban and their Arab allies. Mr. Karzai is also worried about being perceived as an American puppet and has implored the Americans not to discuss publicly the military assistance it is giving him, as Mr. Rumsfeld has.

''From what I hear,'' an administration official said, ''he has got sympathy but, so far, not a lot of allegiance. Families are scared.''

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A version of this article appears in print on November 12, 2001, on Page B00004 of the National edition with the headline: A NATION CHALLENGED: ALLIANCES; Savoring Strength in the North, U.S. Worries About Weakness in the South. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe